This is related to a different but just as exciting type of space, that being underwater. I hope this get enough funding since it looks like a phenomenal platform for scientific study. Also, it looks really cool.

I recently acquired a [http://raspberrypi.org Raspberry Pi] board. It is a very cool device running linux on an ARM chip, with USB, Ethernet, HDMI output and the operating system runs off an SD card. The board costs only $35.

So it took me about 20 minutes to image the SD card and boot the machine up. Start up X Windows and I find a browser and some interesting other applications on the desktop.

One of my main goals of using the board is to take advantage of its IO capabilities. it comes with GPIO pins, and can be connected to other devices including an [http://www.arduino.org Arduino]. The Arduino is useful because it can handle more types of devices. The downside of the Arduino is that it uses a single control loop to perform its actions. With the RPi hopefully i can use the more sophisticated programming environment.

Most of my work has been using Delphi (object orient pascal). A open-source development tool is [http://www.lazarus.org Lazarus] that uses Free Pascal Compiler. (It is heavily based on Delphi).

There were a couple of odd things in getting installed:
First I ran:
apt-get install fpc

This is a link to a chart showing the scale and levels of radiation from various things. It is good to put things literally in proportion when considering the effects of events such as the reactor problems in Japan.

I have been investigating [http://www.blender.org Blender] and it seems like a great tool to create various scenes to show on the monitors in the Spaceroom. With some game logic it would be easy to select the various videos to show on the screen.
The videos could easily be incorporated into some of the main program windows.